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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

HoJo's: It's not just for vacations anymore

We may be devo, but at least we're not all the way back to "primitive South American tribe."

Yet.

But when we get there, by God, you'll see it in Florida first. And WFTV in Orlando will be there to report on it:

Investigators in Seminole County say they've discovered a bizarre problem: adult children are dropping off their elderly parents at hotels and motels, and abandoning them.

"A lot of the local hotels seem to be getting seniors that are just dropped off by their kids," said Officer Zach Hudson of the Lake Mary Police Department.

One man was left at the La Quinta Inn in Lake Mary for several weeks.

"Two different times he fell out of his bed during the midnight shift. We didn't know about it. We had people call up, saying there's a gentleman in this room, he's screaming for help," said Chris Loker of La Quinta Inn.

The problem comes down to money.

"A lot of these nursing homes are too expensive for the kids, much less their elderly parents," Hudson said.

Part of the problem is the hotels and motels are neither trained nor equipped to take on the elderly people, especially since some of the senior citizens have medical issues that require medical treatment.

But, Officer Hudson told WFTV, when parents are left at the hotels to fend for themselves no crime has been committed.

I GUESS dumping Pops at Disney World would be cost prohibitive, huh?

Even the Terroriss Muslins (copyright pending, Tea Party Patriots) over there in Saudi Arabia have the decency to dump their parents at actual hospitals, according to this 2005 Arab News story:

Some elderly Saudis are being disposed of by their families who dump them off in front of area hospitals and speed away, leaving doctors furious and flabbergasted by this bizarre, cruel behavior.

Recently, three separate families abandoned their parents — and their responsibilities — at King Fahd Hospital.

In an incident at the hospital on Tuesday, a woman in her late 80s who was abandoned by her son there 10 days earlier was reunited with him. During her hospital stay, officials tried several times to get in touch with her family, who denied her existence.

Security guards were able to trace her taxi-driver son who ditched her at the hospital. He was recognized as a regular visitor to the premises, frequently dropping off passengers at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) entrance.

The man arrived at the hospital accompanied by his young son, and when confronted by hospital officials he denied any relation to the old woman despite her enthusiastic greetings.

“Waleed,” she cried.

“After checking the man’s ID we established that, in fact, it was his name,” said the Dr. Abdul Malik Al-Huti, head of the ICU.

If there was any doubt, the little boy put it to rest.

“When we brought in the young child accompanying his father, he took one look at her and said she was his grandmother.”

After officials had a long, generally unpleasant discussion with “Waleed,” he reclaimed his mom.

A DOCTOR there was nonplussed by the whole thing.

“This phenomenon of abandonment by families of their elders is new in our community,” he said at the time, “and it is unacceptable to the majority of Saudi society.”

But that's just because the Terroriss Muslins (copyright pending, Newt Gingrich) ain't advanced like we are. Then again, I'll bet it won't be long before we concede that the Aché tribe in Paraguay has a point (and not just that at the end of a spear).

"The idea that it’s human nature for parents to make sacrifices for their children and, in turn, for their grown children to sacrifice for their aging parents — turns out to be a 'naïve expectation,'" geography and physiology professor Jared Diamond told UCLA Today in January.

This assumption, he said, ignores undeniable conflicts of interest between generations.

From a common sense perspective, “Parents and children both want a comfortable life — there are limits to the sacrifices that they’ll make for each other.” And from a scientific perspective — natural selection — Diamond noted, “It may under some circumstances be better for children to abandon or kill their parents and for the parents to abandon or kill their children.”

Those circumstances include life’s often heart-wrenching realities — from the threat of starvation among indigenous tribes to the difficult choices posed by modern societies’ life-prolonging medical care, Diamond said.

Traditional nomadic tribes often end up abandoning their elderly during their unrelenting travels. The choice for the healthy and young is to do this or carry the old and infirm on their backs — along with children, weapons and necessities — through perilous territory. Also prone to sacrificing their elderly are societies that suffer periodic famines. Citing a dramatic example, Diamond said Paraguay’s Aché Indians assign certain young men the task of killing old people with an ax or spear, or burying them alive.

“We react with horror at these stories, but upon reflection, what else could they do?” Diamond asked. “The people in these societies are faced with a cruel choice.”

Those of us in modern cultures face cruel choices of our own, he added. “Many of you have already faced or will face a similar ordeal when you are the relative responsible for the medical care of an old person — the one who has to decide whether to halt further medical intervention or whether to administer painkillers and sedatives that will have the side effect of hastening death.”